While choosing your words

While choosing your words it is as if you were at a window looking out into the world. If the light that falls upon what lies beyond is very bright, you see the scene in vivid colors and there is only the faintest hint of your reflection in the glass. If the light beyond the window is faint, as at dusk, the speaker’s reflection in the glass is much more prominent. The speaker notices both his or her reflection and the scene beyond. And if it has grown dark outside, dark enough to make a mirror of the window, the speaker, or presence, sees very little other than his or her own reflection. In such a poem, presence is pronounced and superior to what is outside. . . .

Poets are usually quite consistent in the amount of light they put on the world beyond the glass, poem after poem. There are poets like Ghiselin, whose life work gives us the world outside with such vividness that we scarcely see his reflection, and poets like Dickinson, who darkens the light on the world enough to keep her reflections always before us. Sometimes poets gradually change during a long life of writing, moving away from fixing a bright light on the world beyond them toward more and more revelation of their personalities. I’ve done that myself. Or they may move in the opposite direction, beginning their writing careers with poems about themselves but gradually become more and more devoted to portraying the world beyond them.

—Ted Kooser, *The Poetry Home Repair Manual *

Photo by r. nial bradshaw, CC BY 2.0.